Young faces usually filled with warmth and wonder
are now taut with anticipation and purpose. Eyes are lasers. Hearts are
pounding. This is nothing unusual for the final minutes before a high
school football game. But a coach and his players are about to share an
exchange that is downright foreign to the tough-guy culture of
football.

The coach, Joe Ehrmann, is a former NFL star, now 55
and hobbled, with white hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Still, he is a
mountain of a man. Standing before the Greyhounds of Gilman School in
Baltimore, Ehrmann does not need a whistle.

"What is our job as coaches?" Ehrmann asks.

"To love us!" the Gilman boys yell back in unison.

"What is your job?" Ehrmann shouts back.

"To love each other!" the boys respond.

"Masculinity ought to be defined in terms of
relationships," says Joe Ehrmann, "and taught in terms of the capacity to
love and be loved."

The words are spoken with the commitment of an oath,
the enthusiasm of a pep rally.

This is football?

It is with Ehrmann. It is when the whole purpose of
being here is to totally redefine what it means to be a man.

This is lofty work for a volunteer coach on a high
school football field. It is work that makes Ehrmann the most important
coach in America.

In his eighth season at Gilman, Ehrmann's r´sum´ is
anything but ordinary for a defensive coordinator. After 13 years in
professional football, most of them as a defensive lineman for the
Baltimore Colts, he retired in 1985 and began tackling much more
significant challenges. As an inner-city minister and founder of a
community center known as The Door, Ehrmann worked the hard streets of
East Baltimore. He also co-founded a Ronald McDonald House for sick
children and launched a racial-reconciliation project called Mission
Baltimore. Now he's a pastor at the 4000-member Grace Fellowship Church
and president of a national organization that supports abused
children.

"He's a lot of things to a lot of people," says
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. "He's really an opinion leader. And
what I love about Joeit's not just the messages. It's the messenger. He's
a very unique man. Gentle. Principled. Committed. And effective."

Aside from the X's and O's of football, everything
Ehrmann teaches at Gilman stems from his belief that our society does a
horrible job of teaching boys how to be men and that virtually every
problem we face can somehow be traced back to this failure. That is why he
developed a program called Building Men for Others, which has become the
signature philosophy of Gilman football.

The first step is to tear down what Ehrmann says are
the standard criteriaathletic ability, sexual conquest and economic
successthat are constantly held up in our culture as measurements of
manhood.

"Those are the three lies that make up what I call
false masculinity,'" Ehrmann says. "The problem is that it sets men up
for tremendous failures in our lives. Because it gives us this concept
that what we need to do as men is compare what we have and compete with
others for what they have.

"As a young boy, I'm going to compare my athletic
ability to yours and compete for whatever attention that brings. When I
get older, I'm going to compare my girlfriend to yours and compete for
whatever status I can acquire by being with the prettiest or the coolest
or the best girl I can get. Ultimately, as adults, we compare bank
accounts and job titles, houses and cars, and we compete for the amount of
security and power that those represent.

"We compare, we compete. That's all we ever do. It
leaves most men feeling isolated and alone. And it destroys any concept of
community."

Ehrmann offers a simple but powerful solution. His own
definition of what it means to be a manhe calls it "strategic
masculinity"is based on only two things: relationships and having a cause
beyond yourself.

"Masculinity, first and foremost, ought to be defined
in terms of relationships," Ehrmann says. "It ought to be taught in terms
of the capacity to love and to be loved. It comes down to this: What kind
of father are you? What kind of husband are you? What kind of coach or
teammate are you? What kind of son are you? What kind of friend are you?
Success comes in terms of relationships.

"And then all of us ought to have some kind of cause,
some kind of purpose in our lives that's bigger than our own individual
hopes, dreams, wants and desires. At the end of our life, we ought to be
able to look back over it from our deathbed and know that somehow the
world is a better place because we lived, we loved, we were
other-centered, other-focused."

From the first day of practice through the last day of
the season, Ehrmann and his best friend, Head Coach Biff Poggi, bombard
their players with stories and lessons about being a man built for
others.

They stress that Gilman football is all about living in
a community. It is about fostering relationships. It is about learning the
importance of serving others. While coaches elsewhere scream endlessly
about being tough, Ehrmann and Poggi teach concepts such as empathy,
inclusion and integrity. They emphasize Ehrmann's code of conduct for
manhood: accepting responsibility, leading courageously, enacting justice
on behalf of others.

"I was blown away at first," says Sean Price, who
joined the varsity as a freshman and is now a junior. "All the stuff about
love and relationshipsI didn't really understand why it was part of
football. After a while, though, getting to know some of the older guys on
the team, it was the first time I've ever been around friends who really
cared about me."

Four hours before each game, the Gilman players file
into a meeting room for bagels, orange juice and Building Men for Others
101. Ehrmann and Poggi tell their players they expect greatness out of
them. But the only way they will measure greatness is by the impact the
boys make on other people's lives.

Ultimately, the boys are told, they will make the
greatest impact on the worldwill bring the most love and grace and
healing to peopleby constantly basing their actions and thoughts on one
simple question: What can I do for you?

That explains the rule that no Gilman football player
should ever let another studentfootball player or notsit by himself in
the school lunchroom. "How do you think that boy feels if he's eating all
alone?" Ehrmann asks his players. "Go get him and bring him over to your table."

There are other rules that many coaches would consider
ludicrous. No boy is cut from the Gilman team based on athletic ability.
Every senior playsand not only late in lopsided games. Coaches must
always teach by building up instead of tearing down. As Ehrmann puts it in
a staff notebook: "Let us be mindful never to shame a boy but to correct
him in an uplifting and loving way."

Whenever Ehrmann speaks publicly about Building Men for
Othersusually at a coaching clinic, a men's workshop or a forum for
parentssomeone inevitably asks about winning and losing: "All this
touchy-feely stuff sounds great, but kids still want to win, right?"

"Well, we've had pretty good success," Ehrmann says.
"But winning is only a byproduct of everything else we doand it's
certainly not the way we evaluate ourselves."

"I was blown away at first," says Sean Price, now a
junior. "It was the first time I've ever been around friends who really
cared about me."

Unless pressed for specifics, Ehrmann does not even
mention that Gilman finished three of the last six seasons undefeated and
No. 1 in Baltimore. In 2002, the Greyhounds ranked No. 1 in Maryland and
climbed to No. 14 in the national rankings.

Much more important to Ehrmann is the way that his team
ends each season when nobody else is watching. Before the last game, each
senior stands before his teammates and coaches to read an essay titled
"How I Want To Be Remembered When I Die."

Here is something linebacker David Capernareading from
his own "obituary"said last year: "David was a man who fought for justice
and accepted the consequences of his actions. He was not a man who would
allow poverty, abuse, racism or any sort of oppression to take place in
his presence. David carried with him the knowledge and pride of being a
man built for others."

The most important coach in America sat back and
smiled. Win or lose on the field of play, Joe Ehrmann had already scored
the kind of victory that would last a lifetime.

Pulitzer Prize-winner
Jeffrey Marx is the author of "Season of Life," a book about Joe Ehrmann,
just published by Simon & Schuster.

Recognize the "three lies of false masculinity."
Athletic ability, sexual conquest and
economic success are not the best measurements of manhood.

Allow yourself to love and be loved.Build and value relationships.

Accept responsibility, lead courageously and enact justice on behalf of others.
Practice the concepts of empathy, inclusion and
integrity.

Learn the importance of serving others.
Base your thoughts and actions on "What can I do for you?"

Develop a cause beyond yourself.
Try to leave the world a better place because you were here.

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